David Attenborough, Mark Carwardine, Simon King, and George Monbiot spell out the case against the proposed badger cull in the UK: that the evidence gained has pointed out such a cull will be, at best, ineffective, and at worst, make the problem worse, at a cost of perhaps half the UK's badger population. Rather, they say, deploy an oral vaccine for badgers - considerably more effective, far more humane, and likely to be cheaper too. The Badger Trust has a Q&A on bovine tuberculosis (PDF), for further information.

Brian May has set up a petition over here - but obviously, opposition oughtn't amount to just that. Your MPs should hear as well, and the word should be spread - make the issue noticed.

Green Bytes apparently picked up Tens Complement last year, and are now releasing a pukka implementation of ZFS for OS X (64-bit Intel only, Snow Leopard or later, with a recommendation of being able to spare 1GB RAM per 1TB storage): ZEVO Community Edition, as noted here.

Pinboard ("social bookmarking for introverts") looks sort of tempting - nicely fully featured, clean design, and no advertising or other junk, just a one-time signup fee of $9.89. Check out the testimonial quotes on the front page, too, particularly the Economist's. =:) If you're reading this, do you use Pinboard, Pinterest, Delicious, or similar services? How useful do you find them?

I'm really quite intrigued by the whole thing, too. Even with a video codec that deals in vectors rather than pixels, how do you cope with the fact that both CCD sensors and displays are inherently pixelated?

The fundamentals aren't actually that strange - you literally contourise the image. It's a fairly time-consuming process at the moment, but entirely feasible, with a lot of different ways of going about it (and therein lies part of the secret sauce =:). Perform it well, and you wind up with just a huge pile of contours, which you can then manipulate in interesting ways rather more difficult to achieve in pixelspace, before reconstituting them. Scale as you wish, then rebuild to whatever size you want. (It's quite amusing to see how large images can be magnified - of course, you don't ever wind up with more detail than was in the original, but this approach does lend itself to retaining features without going pixellated)

Hence the pipeline: from pixels to contours, then at the other end, back to pixels, just in time for it to hit the display, or an existing broadcast chain.

Heh, contourization — I still remember being fascinated by how you could actually do that the first time I saw it being done. Come to think of it, I should still have my copy of Computer imaging recipes in C somewhere; not ever a particularly useful book for me, but I found it quite interesting anyway. Presumably the state of the art has advanced quite a bit since its publication, of course. ^_~